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Edward Jackman remembers when he started in Los Angeles 'We just kind of juggled. We didn't know you could have an act." That's the same person who was named National Association of Campus Activities Comedy Campus Entertainer of the Year in 1985 for, among other juggling feats, balancing a bicycle on his head while juggling three clubs.

He began performing at age 15, and one of his regular haunts was the theatre lines in Westwood with his friend Daniel Rosen, who has also gone on to greater things. Conditions were not ideal, he recalled. "Westwood was guerilla warfare more than anything else," he said. "You were standing between two parked cars just off the sidewalk because you couldn't block the sidewalk. Hare Krisnas came by and tried to chase you out, then buses would come by in the middle of your show and you'd have to scream to be heard."

He found more pleasant conditions in Balboa Park in San Diego and settled there, spending all day sharing the performance space with other jugglers like Mark Nizer, Kit Summers, Ben Decker and Dan Wiles. The peer presence forced them to

stretch for better technique and audience rapport. Nizer remembered seeing Wiles juggle five clubs while bouncing on a slack rope to keep two hoops on it spinning in opposite directions. That's a tough act to follow!

Even the famous juggler Dick Franco started on the streets. Before his first big tour with a circus, he traveled to San Diego to practice. He met Bob Rosenberg, who was the first juggler to work Balboa Park regularly, and they juggled together there for about six months.

This duo inspired Kit Summers and Jon Held to try their hands (and hats) in the park, thereby launching two other distinguished juggling careers. Jackman explained, "Since we were in the same place with many of the same people every week, I didn't want them to see the same thing every time. Working there for me made me stretch for new material to entertain the other jugglers who would show up. I always thought being original was more important than being funny."

He improvised a lot, and occasionally flopped and quit in the middle of a show. But it didn't matter because it was the street. Jackman said, "I felt pretty vulnerable out there because I cared a lot about what people thought. It took me a long time to learn that if you cared about making a fool of yourself and what people thought about you, you were dead. So I learned to enjoy it and not worry."

One of the biggest success stories is that of Michael Davis. Davis hoped to be an actor, but in 1973 was mostly delivering pizzas in San Francisco . Following the lead of mimes like Robert Shields, Davis decided to take to the streets as a clown with a partner for his daily bread. After a detour through Ringling Brothers, he was back on the streets without the makeup and without a partner in 1978 and began drawing tremendous crowds for three shows a day at the Cannery. Exposure at the San Francisco Street Performer's Festival led to a slot on the HBO Young Comedians show, which led directly to Broadway and the show "Broadway Follies."

As he travels around the world now doing corporate shows and nightclub engagements, Davis looks back fondly on those days in the streets. He said, "Being a street performer was the thing I did best of anything I ever did. I was killing on the street, and I think my act reached a peak then. I don't think I could go back now and be as good as I was then. I was obsessed, that's all I cared about. It was satisfying also because it was very honest money, Sometimes I do a show now and feel like I didn't earn it, but then I always knew I earned what I got."

Other notable individuals who have come a long way from their early days on the streets are A. Whitney Brown, Avner the Eccentric, Robert Nelson, Daniel Holzman, Barry Friedman and Frank Olivier.

Nelson came to San Francisco from New Orleans as a greenhorn street performer in 1978 and quickly became entertainment coordinator at Pier 39. He likes to think his example of aggressive banter with the audience provided a model and inspiration to help nurture several fledgling performers who started their careers on that stage. He said, "They saw I made a success of it without tremendous technique, that you could become friends with the audience without depending on your technical stuff."

Several successful acts grew from more communal roots. The Pickle Family Circus and the Royal Lichtenstein Circus have survived the early 1970s cauldron of social upheaval. Just as street performers were learning that they didn't have to come from an entertainment background to enjoy some success, these nouveaucircus troupes showed that spirit was more important than heritage. The juggling wasn't very sophisticated at the beginning, remembers San Francisco 's Dana Smith of his experience with the Royal Lichtenstein Circus. "The big trick was juggling four balls for a second," he said. "Back in '72 the killer trick was the neck catch, that was one of biggest applause points in the show!"